Marlin Barton

Alabama Storyteller Marlin “Bart” Barton’s Pasture ArtIt’s a day of firsts. It’s New Year’s Day, 2015. It’s the first day of the Converse College Low-residency MFA winter session where fiction writer Marlin “Bart” Barton is an instructor. And it’s the first day of the first ever college football playoffs. Oregon and Florida State are smacking each other around on huge flat screens on every wall. Hotel guests have taken up residence on the muted blue couches. They cheer and groan and drink local RJ Rockers’ beers with names like Brown Eyed Squirrel and Son of a Peach. I’m playing pool by myself in the Spartanburg, South Carolina Marriott lobby and losing when Bart strolls up. “Want to play?” I ask. “No,” he says. “I don’t play much.”I aim my stick at the cue ball, and I scratch for probably the fifth time in so many minutes.“Yeah,” Bart says, “you and I playing pool is probably not a good idea.” I nod and start to rack the balls.“You know,” he says -- and if you’ve been around Bart for any amount of time, you can bet that what came after that was -- “that reminds me of a story.”“That reminds me of a story,” he says. My grandfather went over to Meridian, Mississippi one time just for fun with a friend of his named Bragg. This would have been back in the Twenties, I guess. They ended up spending all but their last dollar and didn’t have enough money to get back home. So my grandfather found a pool hall, took that last dollar, and won train fare back. This might have been the same trip where Bragg said something my grandfather didn’t like while they were walking along, and Bragg found himself waking up on the sidewalk after my grandfather knocked him out. I would’ve liked to have known him back then. * * *Bart comes to storytelling naturally. As a boy, his mother read to him regularly as he did exercises to correct his dyslexia—a doctor once told his parents, wrongly, that he would never learn to read or write very well—and he listened to stories told by his father and grandparents. He also spent time helping out in his grandfather’s general store, M. C. Barton. It was a meeting place for folks in Forkland, Alabama, the tiny town where Bart grew up, so named because it sits in the fork of the Tombigbee and Black Warrior Rivers. They sold penny candy and meats like ham hocks, pig tails, and souse meat, aka hogshead cheese. It’s easy to visualize customers coming in, browsing, placing their orders at the counter, and then settling into chairs set around the gas space heater near the front of the store to socialize, which, as Bart says, “means they told stories.”He went away for awhile -- Wichita State for school, Clemson to teach -- but Bart came back home to Alabama and settled in Montgomery in 1996. Since then, he has published two novels and three collections of short stories. His third collection of short stories, Pasture Art, came out in March from Hub City Press, a small press out of Spartanburg, South Carolina. The stories in Pasture Art deal in a sense of place, as is almost expected in southern literature, but these stories are not in any way predictable. The varied characters either want to get out of the small towns they live in, or they long for the days before people started leaving. They are contemporary characters dealing with disease, heroin addiction, and sexual identification; and they are characters from the past dealing with disability, racism, and slavery. Either way, the characters feel stuck; they feel imprisoned. * * *In the title story, the main character is Leah, a teenager stuck in Riverfield, Alabama, a small, rural town much like Forkland. Leah cleans house for Mr. Hutchins who creates the pasture art for which the story is named, and she takes care of her alcoholic mother. Leah works to put food on the table; her mother is unemployed. Leah wants to get out, sees methods of escape in the hay bales made to look like a sailboat, a train, and a helicopter in Mr. Hutchins’ pasture: “It isn’t lost on Leah that her three favorites are all something she can ride away on. Out of here by water, rail, or air -- any way will do.” But beside this wishful daydream, Leah has no plans made on how to leave. She has been stealing from her employer -- a tea tray, a necklace, a wedding day photograph -- ostensibly to sell, but instead of making the trip to the pawn shop, she piles the stuff in an abandoned farmhouse owned by Mr. Hutchins. Leah “wishes she had a plan, or that someone would give her one.” “Both the old man and the girl are suffering from a lack of imagination,” Bart says. These characters are imprisoned because of that lack, as are most of the characters in the collection who long for some method of escape. Leah and Mr. Hutchins have the urge to create, to make something from nothing, but they are unable to. Mr. Hutchins stops creating pasture art after his wife dies, and Leah can’t envision a world beyond her home. It doesn’t help any that, in addition to being an unemployed alcoholic, Leah’s mother is a person with type 1 diabetes who refuses to take care of herself. Leah has to give her mother her insulin shots and the occasional glucagon shot when she’s passed out from low blood sugars. It isn’t hard to see why Leah wants to leave so badly, or why she feels compelled to stay. It isn’t even hard to see why, at the end of the story, Leah does not administer a glucagon shot to her mother who is, once again, passed out on the couch. The reader understands that this might mean death, and with that death, freedom.Type 1 diabetes finds its way into Bart’s stories in part because he himself is a person with type 1 diabetes. After he was diagnosed at thirty-seven, he found diabetes coming up more and more often in his writing. Leah’s mother’s character in “Pasture Art” illustrates the sense of denial that many newly diagnosed, and even veteran people with type 1, experience regarding their disease. It is another example of Bart’s characters feeling imprisoned, except this time instead of just feeling stuck in a place, the feeling of imprisonment is also in the character’s own body. Leah’s mother can’t see a way to manage her disease herself. “That’s the human condition,” Bart says. “[she doesn’t] want to see what’s destructive, what’s disabling [her].”I had this image of a girl standing on a hill under a single oak tree with a trailer in the background. I wondered about her life. She wasn’t happy with her life. She wanted something better. Then I got rid of the hill and the tree and the trailer, but I kept the girl. The inability to recognize one’s own disability, one’s own method of self-destruction, one’s own imprisonment-by-lack of imagination, is a major theme running through these stories. In “Watching Kaylie,” Kaylie is a heroin addict who offers herself to Aaron, the main character who has a self-destructive crush on her, for money to buy herself another fix. Kaylie doesn’t recognize her addiction, except perhaps in her self-portrait, a nude with hypodermic needles piercing her nipples, a painting that haunts Aaron’s waking mind. Aaron doesn’t recognize his self-destructive obsession with Kaylie, a woman who not only has an on-again-off-again sexual relationship with Aaron’s brother, but who also is an addict. She is emotionally unavailable, and Aaron knows it. One of the beautiful things about omniscient or limited omniscient points of view is that the reader gets to hear the characters’ real thoughts. In Aaron’s case, those thoughts give the reader a view into his obsession with Kaylie -- a dark and disturbing view. In the beginning of the story, Aaron is watching Kaylie’s house, waiting for her to come home, what some of us might call stalking, or, at the very least, creepy. When Kaylie is dropped off and passes out in her own driveway, Aaron comes to her rescue. He picks her up and takes her in to her bed. He thoughtfully makes sure she is on her stomach so she doesn’t choke on her own vomit, should she throw up. Then, the reader learns this: But that position looked obscene to him, the way her thrift-store skirt had ridden up the backs of her legs, exposing the white flesh of her inner thighs, the rise of her buttocks barely covered, or perhaps she simply looked more vulnerable this way, and even more attractive to him. If he can’t recognize his own self-destructive pattern with Kaylie, at least he recognizes that his attraction to the comatose woman is not something one should follow up on. But Aaron’s own darkness is revealed here, his own personal prison.I knew this guy who was propositioned by this girl he used to know in high school. She wanted money for drugs. Bart will tell you that he tries to work towards hopeful endings. That he thinks Aaron is redeemed at the end of “Watching Kaylie” because he doesn’t have sex with her, even though it’s what he really wants. That he isn’t sure whether or not Leah’s diabetic mother dies from a low blood sugar that Leah could have reversed at the end of “Pasture Art.” He will tell you that he hopes she didn’t die. But he’ll also say that “good fiction should go as deep into human character as you can. If you go deep enough, you’re going to find the dark.” Leah’s mother isn’t the only mother who holds her daughter back through chronic illness in this collection. In “Into Silence,” first published in the Sewanee Review and reprinted in Best American Short Stories 2010, the main character’s mother not only refuses to learn sign language in order to communicate more effectively with her daughter who lost her hearing as a result of a childhood illness, but she also makes the most of her own mild arrhythmia. Janey stays with and cares for her mother even though she knows there is nothing essentially wrong with her. It is only when a photographer with the WPA comes through town that Janey’s imagination, and her own repressed sexuality, starts to stir. In the end, Janey finds her mother dead in bed. It is up to the reader to decide whether the photographer suffocated Janey’s mother in order to free Janey from her imprisonment.That’s Miss Jenny’s house there. See the columns? They never did finish off the tops, so the stubs of tree limbs are still there. They go across the front of the house, too. Miss Jenny was sitting right there on those steps when she heard the last sounds she would ever hear, just like Janey in the story. It was singing from the Episcopal church just down the road. The most haunting, dark, illustrative-of-the-human-condition-according-to-Bart story in this collection is “Braided Leather.” In its brief span of barely a page, the reader learns that the main character, an unnamed slave, tries to escape by hiding in a cave, and his wife gives him up to their master. The slave is whipped; his back flayed open by the lovingly oiled and cared for leather whip. In the scene, his wife kneels before him, her blouse open and pulled down to her waist, and she begs her husband to whip her as an act of contrition. The story is horrifying in its stark honesty and brevity. The characters are imprisoned twice: once by what Bart describes as the “completely destructive nature of the institution” of slavery, and a second time by the wife’s inability to see beyond the fact that her husband is gone. She does not recognize the possibility that his escape might work, or the possibility that this might mean a chance at freedom for her and for their children.I had seen a documentary about this slave in Kentucky who was made to go down and explore these caves. When he was down there, confined in those tight spaces, I thought sure he had to feel more free than in his regular life.My favorite story in Pasture Art involves a UFO, a character to whom “[s]leeping outside’s nothing new...I call it going to the Green Hotel,” and two old dogs named Larry and Jack, one of which may or may not have been eaten. Miller, the main character in “Short Days, Dog Days,” is perfectly happy living right where he has always lived, in Riverfield, Alabama. Miller’s wife, however, is not so thrilled. She wants out, wants to move “to town” where their daughter lives with her girlfriend from California. This is where Miller is stuck. He can’t accept his daughter’s sexual orientation, not even in conversation with his wife: “You been knowing just as long as me that she’s the way she is, and that’s been way more than a year.” “No I hadn’t either. I’ve told you that. I didn’t know until you sat out here and told me.” “Bullshit, Miller. You ain’t as stupid as you sound.”This is one story that does move toward a hopeful ending, one in which a father can break out of the confines of his previously held beliefs and keep his family whole.I did know of this ol’ boy who ate a dog once. The Alabama playoff game is about to come on, so we’re wrapping up the interview. Bart has got his crimson (not red, definitely not red) button-down on over well-worn jeans, and he’s wearing his crimson and white Alabama baseball cap. “I hardly ever wear a baseball hat,” he says. “But I figured this was a good enough time to.” He leans back into the wide blue lobby couch, crosses his left ankle over his right knee, and notices dirt on his shoe.“I thought I got all that mud off,” he says, rubbing at the dried, light brown Alabama soil on the rubber sole. “My wife Rhonda and I bought some land up on the Alabama River and were out walking around, and I misjudged how wet the ground was. I damn near fell in the river,” he says. “I’m gon’ have to clean these off.” I tell him not to worry about it. “You know,” he says. “That reminds me of a story.”